Pamela Bannos discusses her book, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, which Luc Sante calls a “nearly forensic biography” in Bookforum.
Who was Vivian Maier? Many people know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in seemingly abandoned storage lockers. They revealed her to be an inadvertent master of twentieth-century American street photography. But, as Bannos reveals in this meticulous and passionate biography, this story of the nanny savant has blinded us to Maier’s true achievements, as well as to her intentions. Bannos contrasts Maier’s life with the mythology that strangers have created around her absence. Parul Sehgal, of The New York Times, says, “She unseats the ghost and restores to us the woman.”
Pamela Bannos is Professor of Photography in Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice.

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